"The setting is modern London's world of shady family business and family dysfunction, wedding parties, blandly scheming associates and SUVs speeding through the night-time streets. Hamlet looks here like no one as much as Kendall Roy from TV's Succession. Riz Ahmed plays the prince, horrified by a ghostly vision of his dead father (Avijit Dutt) who, in a chilling scene, summons him to a bleak urban rooftop to announce he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Art Malik)."
"Claudius now is a hard-faced property speculator who has evicted a tented community of people led by Fortinbras from some prime real estate, and who now intends to marry Hamlet's mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Hamlet retreats into shocked, enraged indecision and a kind of confrontational madness intended to embarrass the wrongdoers while exempting him from actual punitive action; it creates a growing miasma of authentic tension. Timothy Spall is the ingratiating, menacing Polonius, whose murder is brutally explicit and violent."
"Morfydd Clark is Polonius's daughter Ophelia, now deeply hurt at her former suitor Hamlet's sudden and fanatical coldness to her, and Joe Alwyn is her brother Laertes. Ahmed carries the production with his performance of someone convulsed with weakness and self-hate. This film loses most of the soliloquies (including Alas, poor Yorick and the skull), which traditionally get the audience on Hamlet's side, though To be, or not to be stays; Hamlet virtually screams it at the wheel of his car."
Michael Lesslie and Aneil Karia devised a stark, severe interpretation of Hamlet with transpositions, cuts, light modernisations, and a significantly stripped-down text. The setting is modern London’s world of shady family business, wedding parties, scheming associates and SUVs speeding at night. Hamlet becomes a Roy-like heir, played by Riz Ahmed, who is summoned on a rooftop by his murdered father to learn of Claudius’s betrayal. Claudius appears as a hard-faced property speculator who evicts a tented community and plans to marry Gertrude. The production emphasizes enraged indecision, brutal violence in Polonius’s murder, Ophelia’s hurt, and the loss of most soliloquies.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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